Thursday, 10 March 2016

Alphabetical Discovery - Week E, Day Six: Eagle Twin

Eagle Twin are a peculiar, vaguely experiment, doom-sludge hybrid; they have a classic doom sound tainted by elements of depressive and nihilistic fuzz and grot. Their two-man sound is a flecked with a dirtiness that reaches its grubby fingers through expansive and imaginative vistas. 2009's The Unkindness of Crows is partly based on poet Ted Hughes's semi-completed collection Crow - a desolate, cryptic and mythical series of poems about man's disregard, and subsequent self-corruption, for nature. The crows are symbols of death and hopelessness, manifestations of dread and damnation and a violent and unforgiving natural world - it's a perfect thing to write a dreary doom-record about. Lyrically abstract the music follows similarly dense and unforgiving paths - throbbing, tribal, primal, unrestrained and a bit mad, Eagle Twin's vocalist Gentry Densley (stunning name) sounds like a disheveled hermit moaning into the starry night with feces smothered over his body and with twigs and small animals protruding from his mottled hair. Their sound is quite unruly and dissonant, it tries not to be clean or fluid or easy on the ears: it's rough and dirty - it's how this sort of earthy doom-sludge should sound. Songs do pick up and build to a crescendo of headbangable bluesy-riffs - nothing too extravagant or technical, but fitting and powerful. 2012's The Feather Tipped The Serpent's Feather is a similarly dense allegorical journey through the eyes of the a predator snake - once again dirty and vast and thematically very interesting. Eagle Twin have that gritty Southern-USA folk swamp sound down to perfection. If you want something smelly and dirty with interesting album concepts and a well-done to rare doom-sound these are your guys.